In an interview with CNN, Lee Isaac Chung, director of the new tentpole disaster movie Twisters, responded to his film failing to have any mention at all of climate change, despite being a movie about extreme weather. He had this to say:
“I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like (it) is putting forward any message…. I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.” [emphasis mine]
To which I say: what. What? WHAT??
The new movie is a follow-up to Jan de Bont’s 1996 blockbuster Twister, starring Glen Powell as “the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures” and Daisy Edgar-Jones as “a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City.”
Sounds fun! But also, making a movie about scientists and weather disasters in the Year of Our Lord 2024 that does not once address climate change is an insane choice. Yes, tornadoes and climate are a tougher connection to pin down than, say, heat waves or wildfires, but there is a connection. The warmer atmosphere is already priming a change to the traditional tornado season, with record-setting early months occurring in recent years; the two biggest months of March for tornadoes since 1950 were 2022 and 2023. Peak tornado areas are also on the move to the east in the U.S., as regional temperatures and storm regimes change.
But more broadly: it is absurd to pretend that movies don’t have messages!
Chung did go on to say that, more or less, he is trying to follow a show-don’t-tell sort of ethos. “I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what’s happening on the ground,” he told CNN. “We don’t shy away from saying that things are changing.”
On its face, this is a fine and admirable way to make a movie. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite doesn’t have people yelling “Class warfare!” and no one in David Fincher’s The Social Network descends into a “What if social media platforms—and the people behind them—are bad?” monologue. There sure is a lot of yelling in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash but no one just says “Obsession and art are problematic partners!” These and countless other films may not paint their “message” in neon lights in the sky, but good filmmakers, like any other good artist, gets them across nonetheless.
Twisters, though, is about the storms, and the science behind them, among other things. You can’t just not say the words “climate change” in order to pretend that you’re not shoving a message down someone’s throat. There is no tornado expert out there who doesn’t know and think about climate change!
There are, of course, reasons why someone making a tentpole movie with some of the most marketable stars in Hollywood right now might want to distance themselves from a “message.” Climate change is, frustratingly, still quite split across party lines as an issue; someone making Twisters may well be facing a “Republicans buy sneakers too” sort of dilemma. Studios and the rest of the movie business are engaged in an ongoing existential crisis as this year’s box office revenues continue to disappoint; there may well be pressure on Chung and others to appeal to the widest possible audience. Of course, the lack of even a climate mention in the movie is now a story of its own; who knows what box effect that might have, if any?
Other climate movies manage to avoid explicit discussion of the topic, but they’re generally about other things and use the climate disaster as a backdrop: Interstellar and its dying world is about exploration and relationships and love; Snowpiercer and its post-climate apocalypse train are very obviously a class parable; Don’t Look Up is a flawed satire that picks a flawed metaphor and runs with it. But when the science is the point, the filmmakers do say it: The Day After Tomorrow may be ridiculous, but it shares a lot of DNA with Twisters—they are both movies about scientists confronting drastically altered extreme weather—and the scientist played by Dennis Quaid starts Roland Emmerich’s 2004 movie at the “Global Warming Conference” (not a real thing, but still).
Making movies specifically about climate change is hard. It’s big, diffuse, often complicated and dire to the point of paralysis; it’s tough to find any sort of hero’s journey in the issue. The most famous and successful movie on the topic was a documentary, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and while it may have woken some viewers up to the issue it also somehow cemented Gore’s reputation as something of a bore. In contrast to documentaries, a summer blockbuster has no obligation to be scientifically accurate, or in any sense tethered to the real world. But if you think your 2024 extreme weather movie can exist entirely removed from its climate context, you’re delusional at best and cynical at worst.
Chung told CNN that he “wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we’re preaching a message, because that’s certainly not what I think cinema should be about.” Instead: “I think it should be a reflection of the world.”
A world, maybe, but certainly not this one.
